Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday June 07, 2001 @01:37PM
from the canada-gets-more-tempting dept.

ehud42 writes: "According to this article, 2-way satellite service is available in Canada. Canada is pushing to have high speed internet access available to all Canadians by the year 2004. However, it appears it's available already! CEO Leslie Klien of C-Com is hoping the government will spend less on telco's stringing wires across the tundra and instead give it customers so they can buy his services."

Ok, sat service to Canada makes a lot of sense because the land is so huge, and there are a significant number of people not in the big cities. But on the other hand, providing full coverage is far from trivial, GEO simply isn't an option.

Thus, the satellites will have spend quite a lot of time doing nothing in particular, since no customers will be visible. They'll have to charge a handsome fee indeed to make up for all that under-utilisation.

The first guy is right. 40KB is 400kbps. 12KB is 120kbps. Just move the decimal point. 8 bits in a byte plus the start and stop bits...

I think that is a pretty crazy price for a device with such a lousy RTT. Quoting Satellite bandwidth peaks, is a lot like quoting clock rates for CPUs. They tell a only a very small part of the entire story.

No we haven't. Well, if you are amoung the group who can use windoze you have it already. If your like me, windoze will not do what you need it to do, even if you were willing to run it. Belive me, I've considered it.

FYI, the system can be easily modded to run an ethernet interface for non-MS/non USB capable clients. SB themselves don't promote it, but there are a large number of sites on the Net that explain the mod in great detail.

Even though its nice to have the service available, I reckon I will be waiting around 5 years just for the prices to come down. These sort of costs are only justifiable by mining or oil companies out in the middle of nowhere, but who still need data links. For them it is definetly cheaper to get a satellite connection than to set up telephone cables to somewhere 400km from anywhere.

Also in 5 years the technology will probably have improved enough for making it interesting for home or small business use.

Yes, for young online gamers, latency is an issue.
I don't see this as something that's 'holding back' the satellite internet industry... landline services like cable & dsl tend to be cheaper and easier to install as well, which is a MUCH larger factor.

For everyone else, it's not a big deal, and given the number of rural locations with no high speed and not the best quality dialup, I'd say this is a fantastic solution.

Yes. I grew up in central British Columbia, and have been working the Interent business for about 10 years now.

Another solution for all our wonderful rural communities: Check out www.waverider.com (yes, shameless plug for former employer). They don't provide Interent per-se, but provide equipment to roll out wireless 2-way non line-of-sigh ineternet.
I believe a company called Platinum Communications is rolling out (successfully) the equipment in High River, Alberta (fairly rural area south of Calgary, no plans for high-speed access). For more dense population, this may be feasible. Satellite certainly only fits the really remote areas.

As a Canadian who lives where you will never be cable modem or DSL access, I feel the pain.

You can already get 1-way Satellite in Canada via Expressvu (see expressvu.ca [expressvu.ca]) - the same place I get my TV signal from. They will likely have the 2-way system sometime soon, since the American equivalent is in trial in the US.

Hopefully the prices will be a bit more reasonable. I don't mind paying more than the $40/mo. that cablemodem and DSL people pay in the city, but $200+ a month for a residential service is just too expensive.

I hope we get this service soon, since satellite down and modem up is too expensive and slow. Expressvu, you listening?:)

The satellite is in geostationary orbit at 22,360 miles above the equator. Depending at what latitude you are there is a 250 to 280 ms ping time per hop. Two hops = 560 ms. Add the latency in the equipment of 50 to 100 ms and the time to get from the Washington hub to your site and back.

The other item to remember is this is a Hughes system and as such is subject to the Fair Access Policy. I had a tour of the company last month and it does work. How well it will work when the space segmeng gets congested is another matter.
...dan

This is certainly one option. For 10 users the price does go up. However there are other options out there. Companies like TRG systems out of Vancouver have solutions that are aimed at community groups, villages, and other clusters that come in very favourably to the options shown by C-Comsat. Companies like Telesat have options that can provide connectivity for towns and groups as well. They are not cheap but when the cost of connecting 50 to 100 homes in a community it is not bad at all and it is very robust. Additionally a second high bandwidth carrier can have the clinic or school do video conferencing and other high bandwidth applications.

Big deal. We city folk spend a hell of a lot more on our apartments/houses than rural folk. The farther away you are from the city, the less you have to spend on your property. The difference more than makes up for the expensive Internet access.

According to Judy Elder, head of Microsoft Canada's Consumer Division, Canada generates more porn search requests than any other English-speaking country in the world. And that's total searches, not per capita. This is not a troll, nor is it a joke (although it's damn funny).

Maybe that's why we're leaders in the telecom business, and have better internet access options--we have the demand.

"* C-COM Satellite Systems reserves the right to limit individual user throughput in accordance with the Fair Access Policy (FAP) described in the Terms & Conditions."

So while it might be cool to have 2 way satellite net access, if you actually try to use it to do anything but look at web pages your going to end up paying $150 a month for service that is as slow as a modem.

People in rural areas don't exactly have access to high-speed networks, so this is where it comes in handy. People in Northen Ontario, Nunavut, etc., will find this service useful; but someone in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, etc. will just subscribe to cable.

Don't forget :
- violence : the US are really screwed up with violence (thanks to a nation wide love and fascination for guns and shooting).
- justice is pretty wacky too : frying peoples all year long and awarding 3 Billion dollar (Austin Powers pun not intended) to that smoker guy.

They say you can judge how advanced a civilization is by how well it treats it's prisonners and criminals...

I live in the area this article refers too. Owen Sound is by no means on the cutting edge of technology. Heck, the Artic regions had Internet connectivity back while we were still sending e-mail over the local dial-up Bulletin Boards. These people are shams. This is the third time they promise people in the area wireless high speed Internet, but they have a history of dropping the business and shaffting customers. I signed up with them back when they were reselling Packetwork ADSL Internet connections and promised they would soon have wireless service via Microwave. Many months later, I find out from Packetworks that none of the money that was paid to Nova Communication was sent to Packetworks, and my account was 9 months past due. (This happened to other Nova customers as well.) Before then, Brock promised the same thing while he was working for another Internet service provider. (Bruce Municiple Telephone System, BMI Internet). As far as I'm concerned, anyone sending money to these people are asking to be ripped off.

> The system provides download speeds 16 times faster than a regular phone line

... and...

> Miles himself lives in the countryside and his Internet access at home is the basic, slow dial-up service. He recently downloaded a big file that took more than two hours, tying up his phone line and his patience.
> He downloaded the same size of file using the satellite system in 20 seconds.

A 400/128 kbps "line" for a remote area isn't a terrible deal, despite the high price. However, one of the main things holding back satellite internet connections, besides lack of a decent upload solution, is terrible latency. There's no mention of what one can expect in any of the links above, anyone have any ideas or suggestions/solutions?

The system provides download speeds 16 times faster than a regular phone line and sends information five times faster.

Does the typical home user even need speeds so fast or is everyone just rushing to see who can do what first. Sounds nice to have this service but it seems a bit pricey.
$1,500 after tax for the equipment, plus $150 per month service fee. Businesses pay $2,500 for equipment and $190 a month in service fees.

One of the things I always wondered about is what happens when a company goes under say like PSINet, what happens to the pre purchased bandwidth they didn't use, is there a clearinghouse for it as there is for phone time? Anyone know?

I must agree with the other respondent, studies have shown that the Canadian health system provides the same level of care as the US HMO model for about 70% of the price. In Canada they just deliver the medicine, having to pay someone profit on their procedure doesn't enter into the equation. HMO's take a huge part of the health care dollar away from the patients. While every Canadian enjoys free health care, 50 000 000 Americans are uninsured in the wealthiest country on earth. If privatisation is such a success, ask the Australians why they are buying back their hospitals from the private corporations they sold them to.

The Canadian doctors who are dissatisfied come to the US because they can bill their HMO higher than the cap that is in place in Canada. There are many Canadian doctors who wouldn't work anywhere else.

Funny, I would have stated the opposite. Recent studies have shown that Canadian health care delivers almost an identical service as the US model, that wait times for procedures is indistinguishable across the border.

All I hear about Australia is about how US multinationals are moving in to reap the profit that is available through privatising health care, and how doctors and nurse groups (who stand to benefit through privatisation) oppose the trend.

This quote in the New Republic, by a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine:

"Painful experience in the past few years may be forcing a re-examination of that view [market primacy in health care] for many the free market recently has begun to look more like the cause than the solution of our current health care problems. Evidence of its deficiencies is accumulating, and public dissatisfaction with the market-based system is growing rapidly".

In his book, The Welfare State, Dexter Whitfield says one of the reasons governments and their supporters give for embarking on privatisation is increasing efficiency and productivity, yet there is no firm evidence to back up this assertion.

Obviously proponents of privatisation believe that if you repeat the line that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector often enough, the public will eventually believe it.

Canadians are figuring out that the fear-mongering that has been going on for the past thirty years on the public health care system is baseless and comes from right-wing private think tanks.

Canadian health care is as strong as ever, and is viewed as a model by progressive US policy makers.

Reference material can be found here: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/doc uments/health/privat_canada.html

I work at a Radioshack and we have had advertisements running since October for a 2 way satellite service. The service being offered is the Microsoft network and it's got a large download which I forget but only 128kb up. Some customers who were existing DirectPC customers were able to get it already, but I understand they had a lot of problems with the rollout and right now you can't get it. It didn't scale well over 2000 customers apparently.If you talk to your local Radioshack guy you might be able to get in on it though, worth a shot. (assuming you would even want this...)

"You could probably save money by getting about 4 phone lines and isp accounts and combining the bandwidth."

OK, let's figure this out. We'll use my parent's farm as an example.

First of all, we need more than 4 phone lines: because they are out in the boonies, their maximum connect rate with a 56K modem is 24kbps. So rather than 4 phone lines, we need about 16 to reach 400kbps. 16x$25 / month gives me $400 / month.

Installation costs? SaskTel might actually have 16 pairs running to the farm. Once you start digging up the ground, you might as well run enough pairs. What does it cost to run cable, especially in rocky terrain, for short distances? I'll use $50,000 per mile. That's off the top of my head, but I think it's about right. And we need about a mile to reach the trunk.

And it's the nature of telephone companies: whether or not they have to dig new lines or not, that's about what they'd charge. They only charged about $2,000 to hook us up originally, reasonably priced access for everyone is a condition of their monopoly. They'd jump at the price to get their full sunk cost back.

$150 for high speed internet is cheap. As an example, my parents used to pay $70 a month just to get real-time agriculture commodity price information delivered via satellite to the farm.

$150 a month for high speed internet makes living in the country an option for people like me, who depend on quality internet access to do their work. You save the money elsewhere: you can buy a nice house for $20K. When my brother bought a house, he bought it on a line of credit: it was cheaper to pay the extra interest than to pay the mortgage fees.

Oh yeah, I forgot that we were spending the trillions of tax dollars on more important things like appeasing OPEC, supporting/suing tobbaco corporations, and buying tear gas to break up peaceful demonstrations

Well, I remember a peaceful demonstration that took place at UBC in Vancouver about three yeras ago that was protesting an APEC conference, and they used excessive amounts of pepper spray (in some cases). So that takes care of two of your points. =)

As for supporting/suing tobbacco corporations, Canada taxes them at a much higher rate (think higher tax revenues for the government) but is still suing them. It's been in the news around here quite a but I doubt that you get it down south.

Well if they were stringing wires acrosss tundra that might be an issue, but the tree-line is way the hell up there, and about 98% of the country lives below the tree-line. Just so you know we aren't covered in snow all year long, in fact a lot of the major cities usually have a climate more akin to New York than Yellowknife.

Where did you get those bandwidth figures? Here are some from their FAQ:

The speed at which data will flow from the Internet to your PC will average 400kbps. The speed at which data will flow from your PC to the Internet (e.g., when sending an email) will average 128kbps.

While you're using a capital B, and may be meaning kilobytes per second rather than kilobits, they still don't match the FAQ's bandwidth stats, and I think a 10x-20x downstream improvement over a typical dial-up in a remote location is more than a "glorified modem."

On the other hand, their actual pricing sheet says that they may, at their discretion, limit your bandwidth as described in their Terms and Conditions, which they don't seem to make publicly available on their web site.

Okay the satellite dish on the vehicle [storm.ca] is a little much, anyway to use this connection will being able to pretty much hide the electronics?
Actually I will answer my own question, it might be possible to hide this [storm.ca] away.

Total time spent doing NOTHING for downloading three emails: 2 seconds. And that's being NICE. Servers aren't that responsive, and neither is the internet. Expect checking empty mailboxes to take 5 seconds. Which isn't much, but grates on your nerves like the local pop radio station announcer.

FTP is similar, and so are most interactive protocols. Every letter typed on a telnet/ssh session takes at least 240 ms to show up. If you don't type the next letter until the one you typed just shows up, you effectively have a 50 baud modem. Telex was faster (I think).

I'm not too great with this stuff, so if you are better at it than me, please correct any mistakes.

In Ottawa, a cable modem from Rogers@Home costs CAD 39.95/month, or about USD 26.00including modem rental. This satellite service costs nearly USD 100.00/month, plus a setup charge of close to USD1,000.

Nice try, but I think that we'll have to stick with laying cable, at least for the more populous parts of the country (i.e. the parts that can be reached by phone line). In isolated communities, we can have a single (hopefully faster) dish for the whole town, then run fiber to individual homes. That leaves only a tiny percentage of Canadians who would need private satellite dishes or something similar.

Sure, you may have a fat pipe to connect to the net, but your pings are going to be hell! You're talking at least 250 ms for each trip through space... 1 to go up to the sattelite, 1 to come back down. Then, whatever latency there is between the landing station for the sattelite, and the rest of the network, and back. Then, back out to space, and back down. So, you're looking at 1 second (4 * 250 ms) at least to just get a simple ping through.

Sure, that's great if you're just downloading large amounts of small things, but I'd avoid playing any real-time game, 'cause your ping rate is going to be 1000+

It'd probably be good for downloading Linux tarballs or ISO's though:-)

Crap. Canadian health care system is in a state of crisis. Waiting times in some hospitals emergencies rooms is outrageous. Canada should send a team to study the Australian model that is a hybrid public/private system. It works very well.

Um, I think you missed the point. The fact is Canada has a lot of smaller centers. Much more so than the States. Agreed *MOST* of the population lives in the urban centers you mentioned, but that still leaves a substantial number of people who do not have access to high speed internet. For those people this is a wonderful option to have.

I know we use the metric system, but I'd read or heard a stat recently (obviously from an American source) that said 1/7 Sq miles and I was too lazy to do the conversion.
As for internet access, Saskatchewan was one of the first to do it. I believe they started in about 95 offering ADSL. At the time is was about $100/month and required a one year contract.

Okay, a lot of people are complaining about the fact that there might be a 1/2 second delay. Well guess what, that's still a hell of a lot better than the rural folks are getting now. Remember, Canada isn't nearly as densely populated as the US. I think its about 1 person per 7 sq miles where the US is about 10 times that (or more).

This isn't going to be the solution for those of us living in big centers where we hae our choice of DSL and cable. This is for rural areaa, some of whom still dial in over radio! Yes, northern Saskatchewan still uses some Radio for phone communications. So, this is a huge step forward. Lets face it, A town of
This is "the last mile". Its the most difficult thing in connecting to the Internet. Here's an answer. Give it some time to drop in price. I know when DSL started around here, it was over $100/month, not the $45 it is now.

I have StarBand 2-way, and it works great..... now. Installers came out in January, but lacked the right equipment to adjust the dish perfectly, and after a few weeks, my service started getting interrupted constantly. They came back out, this time with the right tools, adjusted it, and now it works great.

You are aware that it's 150 CANADIAN dollars, right? And you're not being fair, you should ammortize that dish cost over 3-5 years, which (with a $1500 dish) brings it all back down to $175 CDN, or $100 USD per year. Isn't that what ADSL costs in the UK?

And 128 kbps is the normal upload cap on ADSL here in Canada anyways.

But for gamers, the half second ping would be attrocious. You'd have to keep a modem account just to play games. Oh well, guess we have to wait for Satelite service from LEO or medium earth orbit (although we'd need tracking dishes, which would be more expensive, upfront and maintenance...). Good news is that there is lots of room up there in the medium orbits so it could be cheaper that way, and it's closer so the power levels can be lower.

Most of the prairies, the arctic, and any place that there's basically a working cellular network could be retrofitted for a working DSL network, I imagine.
Only if you created a completely new wireless network utilizing existing cell towers.

I can tell you, there's damn little on the praries and in the arctic. That's why the only thing that's available is satellite.
Well, except for severe solar storms. Then it all craps out.

What use is a fast connection anyway if you cant play Quake on it?:) (horrific latency)

They can only pull a couple of hundred people using their full bandwith without service detiriorating... so lets be generous and say they can service a couple of thousand users (if they want to live up to their high bandwith promises). Id be surprised if satellite services are a real alternative for point to point links (microwave land instead of satellite links is an option too) for anything but the most remote and thinly populated regions.

Hrm.. so if you keep the service for a year, that runs you about $230 - $390 per month for a glorified modem speedwise. You could probably save money by getting about 4 phone lines and isp accounts and combining the bandwidth. I guess a government is the only organization that would consider something like this.

Some people here seem to think that latency is only relevant for online-games, but the Net is full of interactive applications. Web-mail sucks on a high latency connection, as does irc and other chat programs. Lots of what look like ordinary html pages are generated by interactive database servers, which send and wait for lots of little requests.

"Broadband" is what you need for your tv, where you are a passive consumer of life-style marketing. The Internet, all of it, is much better because it's not just one-way, you can actually interact with others.

The speed of light kind of limits your
latency with a geosync satellite to ~300-350 ms.
Once you factor in their internal network and gateway latencies, it is more like 375-425 ms.
Download speeds were no greater than 256kb and were more like 128Kb. If you think "rain fade"
affects your satellite when watching TV, wait until you are on the internet. I've messed around with my friend's system and the connection really does suck. Maybe they will come to their senses and setup cable modem service, or preferably for people close-by, DSL.
-DN

Well here in Canada we use the metric system, and it's 3 people/sq km. But that doesn't really mean anything because, they're all closely packed into the densely populated areas. The last time I checked, something like 93% of all the people live within 90 km, of the souther border. And in the major cities internet access is pretty cheap. I was one of the first people to have broadband, when it came into my area, and it was $40 CDN, even back in 1996. That's less than $30 US.

Don't forget, that's canadian money theyre talking about. It works out to about $100 American/mo. Pretty darn good if it's high speed, or barely 28.8 if your lucky. In canada there are much fewer urban centres where cable or Dsl is available than the states.

This whole plan to get all Canadians using satellite connections is being aided by Americans that play Counter-Strike and want to ensure that Canadians have 300+ pings. Canadians fooled into thinking that their high speed downloads will also mean low latency will be unable to cope with their skyrocketing ping-times. They'll switch to Everquest. Just wait and see.

Post after post, I keep seeing the same thing repeated: 250-1000ms ping times. I'm assuming this is due to the sheer distance between the ground and these satellites? Just how far up are they orbiting anyway?

My only concern would be how secure is this wireless connection. I recently read an article about people who can intercept info from outside buildings with wireless LAN's. Even if the info I am sending is encrypted, i don't necessariy want people intercepting it. I am not saying the wired internet is the safest, but with this satellite technology be even that safe?

Huh? Your math is squewed. When you average it out, maybe it's 1 person per 7 sq miles, but 80-90% of the population is centered in the urban areas. The population of Southern Ontario alone is 9-10 million. Then the greater Montreal area, the greater Vancouver area, and you've got most of the population.

This article is about how the government should spend its money: subsidize the purchase of satellite dishes by home and business users, or subsidize the development of land lines to remote communities.

Many people have trashed this option for not being as cost-effective as cable or ADSL. True, for most people, it isn't anywhere near as cost-effective...for MOST people. For many people, particularly in Canada's sparsely populated north, cable and ADSL (and sometimes even dialup) simply aren't options. I spend my summers on a six-acre island on Lake Muskoka, Ontario. We get power and telephone from hideously expensive underwater lines that were laid connecting the island to a nearer, slightly larger island, which, in turn, paid a hideously large amount to lay its own lines, which connect it to the mainland. Not suprisingly, cable and ADSL aren't an option. Dialup isn't either. Dialup requires that I dial the nearest ISP and pay long distance charges to connect to it through what appears to be about 10^n hops back to the central server somewhere in the Orion Nebula. Satellite Internet, therefore, is a fabulous option for me, even at this price. It's not the be-all and end-all of Internet access, but it'll certainly help bridge the "digital divide" whereby people in remote areas were the last, if they ever did, to get dialup, adsl and cable, respectively.

Ummm... I think this is primarily because of the modems being USB and 95 doesn't support USB. The lack of Mac, Linux, BeOS, etc. is a simple reality of the market. As the market demands, drivers will appear. So quit whining and start demanding:-)

A small hyperbole I'll admit. However, I (long with apparently 80-90%) of the country live within 200 miles of the US. I also live in a town of about 500 people exactly half way between (30 minutes each way) 2 fairly major cities (Winnipeg being one of them). The cable companies and the telco have basically told me and a lot of others that there are no plans for high speed access in the near future (read - until forced to by the government). The only other option is SkyCable [skycable.ca], however they are still months from offering residential service in my area (I could pay close to C-Com's rates and get a business connection - not!)

On the sight they address latency issue and acknowledge it will be a hindrence to game players. They claim a latency of 0.5 Seconds.

Remember, for a lot of rural Canadians (2nd largest country in the world) this is the only option other then dial up modems (which for us rural hicks never never approaches 28.8, much less 56 anything).

This latency thing is the real killer for satellite. It makes playing most games over the 'net almost impossible, and other applications that require back and forth communications will be slow likewise.

I'd like to see somebody implement one of those flying radio stations with some serious bandwidth. That should provide pretty good performance, and would probably end up being cheaper, as you don't need a booster rocket to get your equipment up, and don't have to design the equipment to withstand radiation that hasn't been tempered by our atmosphere.